She Stoops to Conquer (or Blow?) ...Who knows??
Who's Pivoting Where in Eurasia?
by
Pepe Escobar May 18, 2014.
Consider this: our advanced robotic creatures, those drone aircraft grimly named Predators and Reapers, are still blowing away human beings from
Yemen to
Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is now testing out a
14,000-pound drone advanced enough to take off and land on its own on the deck of an aircraft carrier -- no human pilot involved. (As it happens, it’s only a "
demonstrator" and, at a cost of $1.4 billion, can’t do much else.) While we’re talking about the skies, who could forget that the U.S. military is committed to buying 2,400 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, already dubbed, amid cost overruns of every sort, "the
most expensiveweapons system in history." The bill for them:
nearly $400 billion or twice what it cost to put a man on the moon.
In similar fashion, the U.S. Navy, with 10 aircraft carriers afloat on a planet on which no other nation has
more than two, is now building a new class of “supercarriers.” The first of them, the USS
Gerald R. Ford, is due for delivery in 2016 at an estimated cost of more than $12 billion. It, too, is
experiencing the sort of cost overruns and performance problems that now seem to accompany all new U.S. weapons systems. In the meantime, Washington has dispatched one of its littoral combat ships (a
troubled $34 billion weapons system) to Singapore; is flying
manned aircraft and
drones over the Nigerian bush; and as for building national security state infrastructure of just about any sort, seldom has a problem getting Congress to pony up -- as in the
$69 million now in the 2015 defense budget for the latest prison being constructed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, meant to house just 15 “high-value” prisoners. Similarly, when it comes to the infrastructure needed to listen in on the world, the sky’s the limit, including an almost
$2 billion data center built for the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah. In such "infrastructural" realms, the U.S. is today without serious competition.